Distraction

by Bruce Sterling

  Oscar sighed. “Etienne—can I call you that? I feel that we know and understand one another so much better these days…Etienne, please don’t make people kill you. That can happen very easily, and it’s just not worth it. Listen to me. I sympathize with you. I take a deep, lasting, personal and professional interest in politicians who happen to be monsters. Believe me, it doesn’t get any better after this part. After this part, it just gets worse and worse.”

  “You know that I’m going to out you big-time for this, don’t you? ‘Colombian Clone Freak in Seaside Love Nest with Nobel Scientist.’”

  “Etienne, I’m not just a Colombian clone freak. I am also a professional campaign adviser. Let me give you some very sincere campaign advice, right now. Give up. Go away. Just get yourself some cash out of the slush fund, and get your lovely wife if she really wants to come along, and go into exile. Go into self-imposed exile. You know? Leave the country. It happens. It’s traditional. It’s a legitimate political maneuver.”

  “I’m not gonna run away. Huey don’t do that.”

  “Of course ‘Huey do that,’ dammit! Go aboard a nice French submarine—I know you got a dozen of ’em lurking offshore. Have ’em take you to a nice villa, on Elba, or St. Helena or something. Take a few pet bodyguards. It’s doable! You eat well, you write the memoirs, you’re tanned, rested, and ready. Maybe…maybe even, someday…if somehow things get much, much worse here in America…maybe you’ll even look good. It sounds insane, but I’m not sure I can even judge anymore. Maybe, someday, deliberately imposing schizoid states of mind on unsuspecting human beings will become politically fashionable. But it sure as hell isn’t now. Read tomorrow’s opinion polls. You’re toast.”

  “Kid, I’m Huey. You’re toast. I can destroy you, and your ungrateful bitch girlfriend, and your entire research facility, which, in point of fact, is, and always will be, my research facility.”

  “I’m sure you can try that, Governor, but why waste the energy? It’s pointless to destroy us now. It’s too late for that. I really thought you had a better feel for these things.”

  “Son, you still don’t get it. I don’t need any ‘feel’ for it. I can do all that in my spare time—while I pat my head and rub my belly.” Huey hung up.

  __________

  Now the dogs of War were unleashed on the psychic landscape of America, and even as rather small dogs, with blunt, symbolic teeth, they provoked political havoc. No one had expected this of the President. An eccentric billionaire Native American—for a country exhausted by identity crisis and splintered politics, Two Feathers had seemed a colorful sideshow, an Oh-Might-As-Well candidate whose bluster might keep up morale. Even Oscar had expected little of him; the governorship of Colorado had never given Two Feathers much chance to shine. Once in the national saddle, however, Two Feathers was rapidly proving himself to be a phenomenon. He was clearly one of those transitional American Presidents, those larger-than-life figures who set a stamp on their era and made life horribly dangerous and interesting.

  Unfortunately for Green Huey, the American political landscape had room for only one eccentrically dressed, carpet-chewing, authoritarian state Governor. Two Feathers had beaten Huey to the White House. Worse yet, he correctly recognized Huey as an intolerable threat that could not be co-opted. He was resolved to crush Huey.

  A war of words broke out between the President and the rogue Governor. Huey accused the President of provocative spy overflights. This was true, for the sky over Louisiana was black with surveillance aircraft—feds, proles, military, Europeans, Asians, private networks, anyone who could launch an autonomous kite with a camera on board.

  The President counteraccused the Governor of treacherous collaboration with foreign powers during wartime. This was also true, though so far the premier effect of the Dutch War had been to saturate America with curious European tourists. The Europeans hadn’t seen anyone declare a War in absolute ages. It was fun to be a foreign national in a country at War, especially a country that sold bugging devices out of brimming baskets at flea markets. Suddenly everyone was his own international spy.

  The President then upped the ante. He sternly demanded the swift return of all the federal weaponry stolen from the ransacked Louisiana Air Force base. He threatened unnamed, severe reprisals.

  The Air Force weapons were, needless to say, not forthcoming. Instead, the Governor accused the President of plotting martial law and a coup d’état.

  Huey’s Senators launched a marathon procedural war within the U.S. Senate, with double-barreled filibusters. The President demanded impeachment proceedings against the two Louisiana Senators. He also announced criminal investigations of all of Louisiana’s Representatives.

  Huey called for the President to be impeached by Congress, and for antiwar activists to take to the streets in a general strike and paralyze the country.

  Faced with the prospect of a general strike, the President counterannounced his unilateral creation of a new, all-volunteer, civil defense force, the “Civil Defense Intelligence Agency.” On paper, this seemed a very strange organization—a national debating club of so-called “civil activists,” loyal only to the President. The CDIA had no budget, and its head was an aging, much-decorated war hero, who happened to live in Colorado. He happened to know the President personally. He happened to be a very high-ranking Moderator.

  A closer analysis showed that the “Civil Defense Intelligence Agency” was the Moderators. The CDIA was a gigantic prole gang with the direct backing of the nation’s chief executive. At this point, a Rubicon was crossed. This stroke made it obvious that the Governor of Colorado had been cultivating his own prole forces for years. Huey had used his Regulator proles as a deniable proxy force, but the President was boldly bringing his own private mafia into the open, and brandishing it like a club. The President was a day late and perhaps a dollar short, but he had a great advantage. He was the President.

  Now, for the first time, the President began to look genuinely powerful, even dangerous. This was a classic political coalition: it had worked in medieval France. It was the long-forgotten bottom of the heap, allied with the formerly feeble top, to scare the hell out of the arrogant and divisive middle.

  The President’s first deployment of his semilegal forces was against the now-illegal Emergency committees. This was a stroke of brilliance, because the Emergency committees were universally detested, and even more feared than the proles. Besides, the Emergency committees had lost all their legal backing, and were already on the ropes. Attacking a newly illegal force with a newly legitimized, formerly illegal force struck the American public very favorably. The maneuver had a nice unspoken symmetry to it. It was a player’s move. The President’s ratings went up sharply. He was accomplishing something tangible, where nothing had been accomplished in years.

  The new CDIA, for its own part, revealed some impressive new tactics. The CDIA lacked the legal power to arrest anyone, so they pursued Emergency committee members with nonviolent “body pickets.” These were armbanded bursars who methodically stalked committee members for twenty-four hours a day. This tactic was not difficult for a prole group. “Body picketing” was basically an intelligence stakeout, shadowing; but it was not surreptitious. It was totally open and obvious, and like all paparazzi work, it was extremely annoying to its victims.

  The proles took to this job like ducks to water. They had always been organized much like intelligence agencies—small, distributed, surreptitious networks, living on the fringes of society through shared passwords and persistent scrounging. But as a national goon squad, ordered from above, the prole networks suddenly coalesced into a rigid, crystalline substance. For the President’s enemies, they became a human prison of constant surveillance.

  Or so it seemed. It was still too early to tell whether the President’s CDIA would have any staying power as a New Model Army. But the mere threat of its deployment sent a shock wave through the system. A new era was clearly at hand. America’s Emergency was tr
uly and finally over. The War was on.

  Oscar followed these developments with great professional care, and reacted to catch the popular tide. He had Greta formally declare the Emergency over at the Collaboratory. There was no more Emergency. From now on, it was Wartime.

  “Why are you doing this to us?” Greta demanded, in yet another bone-grinding late-night committee session. “What possible difference does it make?”

  “It makes all the difference in the world.”

  “But it’s all semantic! We’re all the same people. I’m still the lab Director, God help me. And we still have the Emergency Committee as the only people who can run this mess.”

  “From now on, we’re the War Committee.”

  “It’s just symbolic!”

  “No it isn’t.” Oscar sighed. “I’ll explain it to you, very simply. The President has seized power in a time of crisis. He bypassed the Constitution, he undercut the Congress, he annihilated the Emergency committees. He did that by recruiting large gangs of organized social outcasts, who derive their new legitimacy strictly from him, and are loyal to him personally.”

  “Yes, Oscar, we know all that. We’re not blind. And I’m very unhappy about what the President did. I certainly don’t see why we have to imitate his radical, bully-boy tactics.”

  “Greta, the President is imitating us. That is exactly what we did, right here. The President is doing it because you and I got away with doing it! You’re very popular because you did that, you’re famous. People think it’s exciting to seize power with prole gangs, and to throw all the rascals out. It’s a very slick move.”

  Greta was very troubled. “Oh…Oh my God.”

  “I admit, this isn’t great news for American democracy. In fact, it’s bad news. It’s terrible news. It might even be catastrophic news. But it’s wonderful news for the lab. This news means that we’re all much, much less likely to get arrested or indicted for what we’ve done here. You see? We’re going to get away with it. It’s a wonderful political gift from our chief protector and patron—the President. We’re home free! All we have to do from now on is change our shirt whenever the President changes his shirt. From now on, we have protective coloration. We’re no longer crazy radicals, on strike at a federal lab. We’re loyal citizens who are fully and mindfully engaged in the grand experiment of our President’s new social order. So from now on, that’s why we’re the War Committee.”

  “But we can’t be the War Committee. We don’t have our own war.”

  “Oh yes, we do.”

  “No, we don’t.”

  “Just wait.”

  __________

  Two days later the President sent federal troops to Buna. The U.S. Army was finally responding to his orders, despite their deep institutional distaste for coercive violence against American citizens. Unfortunately, these soldiers were a marching battalion of Special Operations/Low-Intensity Conflict specialists.

  The American military, at the historical tag end of traditional armed conflict, knew that they had entered an era where the pen truly was mightier than the sword. The sword just wasn’t much use in an epoch when battlefronts no longer existed and a standing army could be torn to shreds by cheap unmanned machinery.

  So, the U.S. military had downgraded their swords and upgraded their pens. The President’s U.S. Army Seventy-sixth Infowar and Social Adjudication Battalion were basically social workers. They wore crisp white uniforms, and concentrated on language skills, disaster relief measures, stress counseling, light police work, and first aid. Half of them were women, none of them had firearms, and, as a final fillip, they had been ordered into action without any federal funding. In fact, they were already four months behind on their salaries. They’d had to sell their armored personnel carriers just to make ends meet.

  The Collaboratory was now seriously overcrowded. Poaching and eating the rare animals became a commonplace misdemeanor. With a battalion of five hundred mooching soldier/psychoanalysts, plus their camp-follower media coverage, the long-suffering Collaboratory was seriously overloaded. The interior of the dome began to fog over with human breath.

  To keep the newcomers usefully occupied, Oscar deputized the Infowar Battalion to psychologically besiege Huey’s loyalists, who were still stubbornly on strike, holed up in the Spinoffs building. They did this with a will. But the Collaboratory was beginning to resemble a giant subway.

  The ideal solution was to build more shelter. The Moderators, in uneasy symbiosis with the feds, set up tents on the Collaboratory’s spare ground outside the dome. Oscar would have liked to build annexes to the Collaboratory. Bambakias’s emergency design plans suggested some quite astonishing methods by which this might be done. The materials were available. Manpower was in generous supply. The will to do it was present.

  But there was no money. The Collaboratory was surrounded by the city of Buna, and its privately owned real estate. The city of Buna was still on friendly terms with the lab, even proud of them for having won so much publicity lately. But the lab couldn’t commandeer the city by force of arms. Besides, all of Buna’s available rental shelter had already been taken, on exorbitant terms, by European and Asian media crews, and nongovernmental civil-rights and peace organizations.

  So they were stymied. It always boiled down to money. They just didn’t have any. They had proved that the business of science could run on sheer charisma for a while, a life powered by sheer sense of wonder, like some endless pledge drive. But people were still people; they ran out of charisma, and the sense of wonder ate its young. The need for money was always serious, and always there.

  Tempers frayed. Despite the utter harmlessness of the federal SO/LIC troops, Huey correctly took their presence on the border of Louisiana as a menacing provocation. He unleashed a barrage of hysterical propaganda, including the bizarre, and documented, allegation that the President was a long-time Dutch agent. As Governor, and as a timber businessman, the President had had extensive dealings with the Dutch, during happier times. Huey’s oppo-research people had compiled painstaking dossiers to this effect.

  It didn’t matter. Only a schizoid with a case of bicameral consciousness could seriously contend that the President was a Dutch agent, when the President had just declared War on Holland. When the U.S. Navy was steaming for Amsterdam. When the Dutch were screaming for help, and getting none.

  This spy allegation not only went nowhere, it convinced many former fence-sitters that Huey had utterly lost his mind. Huey was dangerous, and had to be pried from public office at all costs. And yet Huey held on, publicly drilling his state militia, conducting purges of his faltering police, swearing vengeance on a world of hypocrites and liars.

  Oscar and Greta had reached the end of their rope. They began to argue seriously and publicly. They had had tiffs before, spats before, little misunderstandings; but after so many hours, days, weeks of difficult administration work, they began to have bruising public combats over the future of the lab, over the meaning of their effort.

  The end of the Emergency and the beginning of the War necessitated the creation of yet another media environment. Oscar shut down the public loudspeakers that monitored Emergency Committee discussions. Wartime was about loose lips sinking ships, about blood, sweat, toil, and tears. It was time to stop propagandizing the people of the Collaboratory. They already knew where they stood and what was at stake. Now they had to defend what they had built; they should be in the trenches with shovels, they should be singing marching songs.

  And yet they could do no such thing. They could only wait. The situation was out of their hands. They were no longer masters of their own destiny, they no longer held the initiative. The real struggle was taking place in Washington, in The Hague, in a flotilla of Navy ships somberly crossing the storm-tossed Atlantic, about as slowly as was physically possible. The nation was at War.

  No sooner had they resigned themselves to their own irrelevance than the situation took a lethal head spin. The leader of the CDIA arrived in B
una. He was a Moderator from Colorado named Field Marshal Munchy Menlo. Munchy Menlo’s original name was Gutierrez; in his distant youth, he had been involved in some nasty anti-insurgency shoot-’em-ups in Colombia and Peru. Munchy Menlo had become something of a lost soul in civilian life; he’d had drinking problems, he had failed at running a grocery. Eventually he’d drifted off the edge of the earth into Moderator life, where he had done very well for himself.

  Field Marshal Menlo—he boldly insisted on retaining his “road name”—was a creature of a different military order than any Oscar had met before. He was plainspoken, bearded, and reticent, modest in his manner. He radiated a certain magnetism peculiar to men who had personally killed a lot of people.

  With the outbreak of War, Oscar himself had had a promotion; he was now an actual, official member of the National Security Council. He had his own hologram ID card, and his own NSC letterhead proclaiming him to be a “Deputy Adviser, Sci-Tech Issues.” Oscar was naturally the local liaison for Field Marshal Menlo. When the man arrived from Washington—on a lone motorcycle, and without any escort—Oscar introduced him to the War Committee.

  Menlo explained that he had come on a quiet, personal reconnaissance. The new CDIA was considering a military attack across the Louisiana border.

  The Collaboratory’s War Committee met in full to hear Menlo out. There were fifteen people listening, including Greta, Oscar, Kevin, Albert Gazzaniga, all the Collaboratory’s various department heads, along with six Moderator sachems. The Moderators were delighted at this news. At last, and with federal government backing, they were going to give the Regulators the sound, bloody stomping they deserved! Everyone else, of course, was appalled.

  Oscar spoke up. “Field Marshal, while I can appreciate the merits of a raid on Louisiana—a lightning raid…a limited, surgical raid—I really can’t see that a military attack on our fellow Americans gains us anything. Huey still has a grip on the levers of power in his state, but he’s weakening. His credibility is in tatters. It’s just a matter of time before internal dissent drives him out.”